Search Results for: white helmets

As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;" "detention underground in total darkness … Continue reading “Obama Thug Squad Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo”

Send me a postcard, drop me a line, Stating point of view. Indicate precisely what you mean to say Yours sincerely, Wasting Away. – the Beatles, “When I’m 64” I set foot, so to speak, on this planet on July 20, 1944, not perhaps the best day of the century. It was, in fact, the … Continue reading “Living Through the Age of Denial in America”

The Internet teaches its own lessons, often painfully quickly. In April 2005, I followed an urge, as I often did in those days. Our president, who would soon claim to be spending his spare time absorbing meaty books like King Leopold’s Ghost, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, and Mao: The Unknown Story, was … Continue reading “One Man’s Online Journey Through Bush’s Alphabet Soup”

Here’s a memory for you. I was probably five or six and sitting with my father in a movie house off New York’s Times Square – one of the slightly seedy theaters of that dawn of the 1950s moment that tended to show double or triple feature B Westerns or war movies. We were catching … Continue reading “The Movie-Made War World of George W. Bush”

Editorial note: This is an excerpt from a pamphlet published in 1996, Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans. We republish it now, in successive installments, because the rise of Barack Obama as the putative Democratic presidential candidate augurs the rise of a new liberal internationalism – the very same … Continue reading “Into the Bosnian Quagmire”

Yes, their defensive zone is the planet and they patrol it regularly. As ever, their planes and drones have been in the skies these last weeks. They struck a village in Somalia, tribal areas in Pakistan, rural areas in Afghanistan, and urban neighborhoods in Iraq. Their troops are training and advising the Iraqi army and … Continue reading “Petraeus’ Grand Delusions”

Just imagine: You run a flagship national newspaper, the New York Times. It’s the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq. Your own record of reportage in the period leading up to the invasion was not exactly sterling. So, for a change of pace, you decide to turn most of your double op-ed … Continue reading “Who Got Iraq Right?”

Someday, we will undoubtedly discover that, in the term “surge” – as in the president’s “surge” plan (or “new way forward”) announced to the nation in January – was the urge to avoid the language (and experience) of the Vietnam era. As there were to be no “body bags” (or cameras to film them as … Continue reading “Escalation by the Numbers”

Of the seven wonders of the ancient Mediterranean world, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, four were destroyed by earthquakes, two by fire. Only the Great Pyramid of Giza today remains. We no longer know who built those fabled monuments to the grandiosity of kings, pharaohs, and gods; nowadays, at … Continue reading “The Colossus of Baghdad”

“Temptation is not random, nor is it one-size-fits-all. Instead, it will always attach itself to our unique talents and aspirations. One of temptation’s cleverest tricks is to seduce that which is a strength. Our strength can become our downfall because we’re tripped up through the misuse or misdirection of our talents and ambitions.” – Jesus … Continue reading “Parents: The Anti-Recruiter”